Spain May Be Targeting a Resurgence as a Renewable Energy Leader

Following its crippling economic crisis that inevitably led to the country losing ground in its status as a global leader in renewable energy production, Spain is looking to prioritize the sector rather than decimating it.

The world knows about Spain’s staggering economic crisis, a downturn in its economy that the country is now starting to climb out of. A lesser known fact could make for insightful reading. Spain, with its 300 days of sunshine and a landscape that receive plenty of winds was the world leader in solar and wind energy production between 2007-08, the year before the global financial crisis. As reported by AFP, the year was also one where a decade-long property bubble burst, resulting in previous subsidiaries and benefits granted to renewable energy adopters being reversed with the government also going back on its promises.

Speaking to the publication, Jorge Puebla, a 41-year-old firefighter and father of two who made a substantial renewable energy investment had damning words for the government at the time.

They ruined my life.

In 2007, Puebla and his wife invested a million euros ($1.1 million) in a solar energy farm in the north eastern region of Spain. Puebla’s parents presented themselves as the guarantors for a bank loan that saw the couple borrow 800,000 euros from a bank. The idea for investing in renewable energy was an attractive proposition at the time, during the reign of the Socialist government in power.

Producers of solar energy were guaranteed a “solar tariff” of up to 44 cents per kilowatt-hour for their electricity, a slab that was promised for 25 years. At such returns, the borrowing couple could
comfortably repay their loan payments of 8,400 euros. However, a budget deficit forced the government to cut its promised subsidies and state aid was completely take down when the conservative party rode to power in the next term in 2011.

Puebla’s unfortunate tale is one that is shared by thousands in Spain. At the height of its status as the top global producer of solar energy, Spain’s solar power sector employed 35,000 people in 2008. Now, Spain only employs 5,000 people, according to Jose Donoso, the head of Spain’s chief solar lobby group UNEF (Unión Española Fotovoltaica).

In a remarkable figure that confirms the extent of the economic crisis and its impact, Spain only added 22 megawatts of photovoltaics installations last year, compared to 2,270 megawatts achieved by Great Britain. The wind energy industry also lost half its jobs in the past eight years due to the government’s shift in stance and the economic crisis, with zero wind power installations added so far this year. The situation is so dire that Abengoa, Spain’s most prominent renewable energy company which employs over 27,000 people from around the world is close to filing bankruptcy.

Spain’s Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy made a pledge at the World Climate Conference 2015 (COP21) to mandate a “law on climate change,” if re-elected. Rajoy has previously spoken against renewable energy, claiming it to be far too expensive for it to be feasible.

Despite the slowest year yet in expanding on renewable energy installations in the past two decades, Spain is still the third biggest exporter of wind power in the world and the fifth largest producer.

Images from Shutterstock.

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The AnonSec hacker group released a 250GB data dump and claimed it tried to cause a Global Hawk Drone to crash in the Pacific Ocean, according to the International Business Times. The hackers gained flight logs, employee personal information and video footage from the $222 million drone.

The data dump included names, phone numbers and email addresses of 2,414 NASA employees, 631 videos from radar feeds and aircraft, and 2,143 flight logs. The dump also included a “zine,” a self-published paper, explaining the technical vulnerabilities the group was able to hack.

How They Did It

AnonSec stated that in 2013 it bought an “initial foothold” from a hacker who had knowledge of NASA servers, then started trying to find out how many computers they could break into and hijack. The administrator credentials for remotely controlling NASA computers and servers were left at default. Hence, it took the hackers no time to penetrate the network and get additional login data using a hidden packet sniffer.

The hackers mapped NASA’s internal network over several months, uncovering details of a wide range of private and public missions, aircraft and airbases. They uncovered video footage relating to Global Hawk drones as well as Operation Ice Bridge polar ice research mission in 2012 and 2013.

The videos show drones taking off on a NASA runway, in addition to aerial footage of big chunks of ice. Flight logs display GPS coordinates, sensor readings and aircraft models.

AnonSec said it infiltrated networks at the Goddard Space Flight Center, the Glenn Research Center and the Dryden Research Center. It was also able to gain full root access to three network-attack storage (NAS) devices gathering aircraft flight log back-ups.

The hackers then programmed the NAS devices to send a copy of all flight logs to their server which is outside the NASA network. In examining the flight logs, the hackers recognized the data included NASA Global Hawk drones’ pre-planned route files. When a drone mission took off, drone operators uploaded flight paths. Hence, the hackers knew they could replace the Global Hawk drone flight file which would cause the drone to deviate from its set flight path and do whatever the hackers wished.

AnonSec wrote that several of its members disagreed on this course of action out of concern for being called terrorists for possibly crashing a $222.7 million U.S. drone, but they continued along this path. The group included a screenshot of how they attempted to deviate the flight path to cause the Global Hawk to crash into the Pacific Ocean.

Ground Control Responds

The Ground Control drone operators noticed it deviated from its flight path and manually accessed it via satellite to redirect it from crashing, AnonSec noted.

NASA then realized the hacking and took measures to inspect its network. NASA changed passwords and patched the vulnerabilities, keeping the hackers out for good.

AnonSec wrote that NASA has been breached more than most people can remember and that the recent hack was not focused at first on drone data and upper atmosphere chemical samples. The original NASA breach was not even planned, “it was caught up in a gozi virus spread.”

AnonSec stated that people might find the poor security surprising, but based on the hackers’ experience, it is pretty standard. Once the main lines of defense are breached, propagating through the network is “pretty much smooth sailing” as long as access is maintained.

Real Goal: Climate Change

AnonSec alerted Infowars, the home of the Alex Jones Internet radio news show, about the zine. Infowars noted the hackers’ main goal was to highlight the U.S. government’s use of climate engineering methods like geoengineering and cloud seeding to manipulate the climate and cause more rain to fall to fight carbon emissions.

AnonSec claimed in 2014 to have hacked an NSA drone and has hacked Indonesian, Turkish and Israeli commerce and government websites for political reasons.

Images from Shutterstock and Facebook.

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4.8 stars on average, based on 3 rated postsLester Coleman is a veteran business journalist based in the United States. He has covered the payments industry for several years and is available for writing assignments.

Private Clean Energy Technology Group Announced by Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

In a Facebook post today, company CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he and his wife Priscilla Chan have joined former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates in launching a new initiative. Dubbed the “Breakthrough Energy Coalition”, the founders will look to support companies that are working on zero-carbon clean technology solutions around the world.

The timing of the announcement comes during a time when the U.N. Climate Control Conference takes place in Paris this week. The Breakthrough Energy Coalition is a private group of investors made up of the likes of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO; Jack Ma, Founder of Ali Baba and Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group and Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn among other global billionaire investors. Arguably, the working group has a collective net worth over nearly $400 billion and will privately invest in high-risk research on promising technologies.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition

The coalition notes that current funding initiatives from governments are hugely lacking in meeting energy challenges and demands. An excerpt from the coalition’s website reads:

The existing system of basic research, clean energy investment, regulatory frameworks, and subsidies fails to sufficiently mobilize investment in truly transformative energy solutions for the future.

Citing the need for an immediate influx in funds and the need for new zero-carbon technologies, a statement notes the coalition “cannot wait for the system to change through normal cycles.”

A paper written by Bill Gates explaining in the innovation and the Breakthrough Energy Coalition can be downloaded here. [PDF]

Mission Innovation

As a separate program, Mission Innovation’s goals are similar to that of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition and is expected to be announced in Paris as well. While the Coalition’s primary objective is to accelerate the ideas and progress for clean energy solutions, Mission Innovation’s primary goal is to bring affordable clean energy innovation to the masses.

A complete breakdown of the participating countries of Mission Innovation and their efforts to contribute to clean energy solutions can be seen here.

As reported by the Washington Post, U.S. officials have confirmed that President Obama and Bill Gates will –along with 20 other countries listed above – announce measures and ‘unprecedented efforts’ to make significant advances in clean energy R&D.

With Mission Innovation, the world’s biggest economies will commit to double their public investments in basic energy research over the next five years, the publication revealed from official sources in Obama’s administration.

Presently, over 180 countries have already pledged to cut or limit carbon pollution with the aim to curb the rise of global temperatures by over 2 degrees Fahrenheit (3.6 degrees Celsius). The pledges and programs will formally be announced and unveiled during the two-week climate conference that includes over 190 participating nations.

Images from Shutterstock and Mission Innovation.

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What sort of future do you want your grandkids to live in? According to some scientists, the choice is yours. San Francisco-based psychologist Dr. Helen Wambach, in the 80s, found evidence suggesting that the mind plays a part in creating our destiny. Her hypnosis subjects, who she steered sometimes into the future, divulged vivid worlds. Sometimes they were dystopian, sometimes utopian.

While hypnotizing groups of people in small workshops, directing them to specific time periods, she would ask them questions about their sex, clothing style, occupation, utensils used while eating, and other questions.

Throughout her twenty-nine year study of past-life phenomenon, she hypnotized thousands of individuals, and found many of them recalled startlingly accurate descriptions of the time-and-place in their past life.

Wambach found that most of her subjects, 90 percent, had subconscious memories of past lives. They recalled working as peasants, laborers, farmers, and primitive food gatherers. Less than 10 percent recalled past lives as aristocrats, and none remembered ever being famous. Her subjects, when traveling back to the 18th century, correctly described the three-pronged forks of the time. By the 1790s her subjects described four-pronged forks. In other words, they accurately described the evolution of the fork.

Wambach discovered she could fast-forward people into their futures lives. Subjects vibrantly detailed their future life and the future of the world. Wambach initiated a major future-life-progression research study in France and the U.S. She died, unfortunately, before she could see this project to the end. Her colleague, the now-world renowned psychologist Chet Snow, saw her study to the end, and published the results in his book Mass Dreams of the Future, first published by McGraw Hill & Co., in November 1989.

The subtitle of Snow’s book is, “Do we face an Apocalypse or a Global Spiritual Awakening?” The investigation of “humanity’s hidden inner-vision of our species’ future” was conducted between 1980 and 1988. The researchers used Wambach’s method, “Future Life Progression Hypnosis,” in order to get an idea of Earth’s and humanity’s different possible futures 150 and 300 years from now. Snow’s contact with the subject provided many interesting predictions for the coming years.

In 1983, Snow correctly predicted many forthcoming world events for the 1990s, like the Yugoslav civil war and break-up, the rise in Pacific Rim volcanic activity, and world-wide seismic activities. His other extreme forecasts for the ‘90s, such as the sinking of part of California and Hawaii, have yet to transpire. Other predictions, like extreme weather patterns, temperature increase and droughts and floods in untypical places seem to be taking place.

Blade Runner would be an example of a dystopian vision of the future.

Snow and Wambach’s findings have had an effect on numerous researchers in scientific fields, such as the health field, where Dr. Raymond Moody wrote that Snow’s book represents “an important and significant book . . . in this time of both great crisis and great opportunity for the world.”

“I could not stop reading this fascinating book and although many aspects of it look grim, it also looks very realistic,” said Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

It is very important we begin to realize that our minds create our future.

The 2,500 reports gathered from the hypnotized time travelers featured some similarities. For instance, nearly all of them foresaw a severely decreased world population in the future. Many did not occupy a physical body in the future. Altogether, the subjects detailed four basic premonitions for the future.

Type 1: Some foresaw a bleak future in which most lived in space stations. They wore silvery suits and ate synthetic food.

Type 2: The so-called “New Agers” foresaw living happier and more nature-oriented lives with goals of learning and spiritual development in an ecologically sound, creative and spiritual future.

Type 3: The “hi-tech urbanites” foresaw bleak mechanical existences with people living in underground cities and cities enclosed in domes and bubbles, perhaps similar to The Simpsons Movie. These high-tech cities were designed to protect against a harsh outside environment.

Type 4: This group found themselves as post-disaster survivors in a world that had been torn apart by some sort of disaster, perhaps similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. People in this group dwelled in homes of urban ruins to caves to isolated farms, wearing plain hand sewn clothing of fur. They obtained food by hunting.

Some subjects foresaw the rise of clans of people born with enhanced telepathic and psychic powers. How to explain this phenomenon? Snow does so with the holographic model of the universe, otherwise known as the holographic principle. Put simply, this theory posits the universe functions as a hologram.

Reality, as we experience it, is not the reality of the universe, just our perception thereof. In other words, the universe is a consciousness hologram, and reality is our projected illusion. Sound familiar? Similar ideas have been put forth in movie (The Matrix) and even in TV (Star Trek). The Holographic Universe, a 1991 book by Michael Talbot, offers a popular, yet scientific take, on the notion.

Reality is not what it seems in The Matrix.

Snow, since publishing the book, continued the research, investigating indigenous cultures like Arizona’s Hopi nation and Australian Aboriginal peoples. The results suggested that, no matter one’s cultural background, visions of the future demonstrate significant cultural and environmental changes on the horizon.

“Striking contemporary events like massive UFO sightings and the enigmatic crop circle formations bear witness to the fact that we continue to live in ‘interesting times,’” Snow once wrote. “All of the four future civilization types outlined in my book are currently distinguishable, albeit still in somewhat embryonic form. Only the reason behind the massive decline in world population that both our dreamers and indigenous seers foretell for our current century has yet to be identified in a clear and unambiguous fashion.”

Pharrell’s “Happy” was a hit song with a positive message.

Snow believed such findings suggested different possible futures, or holoverses, leading Snow to believe we create our own destiny, both individually and collectively. According to him, the four above-mentioned scenarios offer a view into our possible futures as a human race, and, what happens next, is our choice. There is a vast catalogue of dystopian works painting joyless futures. Snow believes we should re-evaluate this practice.

Instead, our time would be better spent believing in and visualizing a happy and productive future for mankind. This is reminiscent to the Planetary Commission, a collection of millions of individuals, who, on December 31st from 12pm-1pm Greenwich Mean Time, unite in prayer and meditation on world peace and healing.

“If we are continually shaping our future physical reality by today’s collective thoughts and actions, then the time to wake up to the alternative we have created is now,” states Snow. “The choices between the kind of Earth represented by each of the Types are clear. Which we do want for our grandchildren? Which do we want perhaps to return to ourselves someday?”

Featured image from Shutterstock.

Important: Never invest (trade with) money you can't afford to comfortably lose. Always do your own research and due diligence before placing a trade. Read our Terms & Conditions here. Trade recommendations and analysis are written by our analysts which might have different opinions. Read my 6 Golden Steps to Financial Freedom here. Best regards, Jonas Borchgrevink.

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Justin O'Connell is the founder of financial technology focused CryptographicAsset.com.
Justin organized the launch of the largest Bitcoin ATM hardware and software provider in the world at the historical Hotel del Coronado in southern California.
His works appear in the U.S.'s third largest weekly, the San Diego Reader, VICE and elsewhere.

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